Dousing the Coal-Fired Plant

Sep 21, 2008 - USA Today

In a report compiled in early 2007,
the Department of Energy listed 151 coal-fired power
plants in the planning stages and talked about a resurgence
in coal-fired electricity. However, over the next
several months, 59 proposed coal-fired power plants
either were refused licenses by state governments
or quietly abandoned. In addition to the 59 plants
that were dropped, close to 50 more are being contested
in the courts, and the remaining plants likely will
be challenged as they reach the permitting stage.
What began as a few local ripples of resistance quickly
is evolving into a national tidal wave of grassroots
opposition from environmental, health, farm, and community
organizations and a fast-growing number of state governments.
The public at large is turning against coal. In a
recent national poll by the Opinion Research Corporation
about which electricity source people would prefer,
only three percent chose coal. One of the first major
coal industry setbacks came in early 2007, when environmental
groups convinced Texas-based utility TXU to reduce
the number of planned coal-fired power plants in that
state from 11 to three-and now even that trio of proposed
plants may be challenged. Meanwhile, the energy focus
within the Texas state government is shifting to wind
power. The state is planning 23,000 megawatts of new
wind-generating capacity (equal to 23 coal-fired power
plants).

In May, Florida's Public Service Commission
refused to license a huge $5,700,000,000, 1,960-megawatt
coal plant because the utility could not prove that
building it would be cheaper than investing in conservation,
efficiency, and renewable energy sources. This argument
by Earthjustice, a not-for-profit environmental legal
group, combined with widely expressed public opposition
to any more coal-fired power plants in Florida, led
to the quiet withdrawal of four other proposals. Republican
Gov. Charlie Crist, who keenly is aware of Florida's
vulnerability to rising seas, actively is opposing
new coal plants and has announced that the state plans
to build the world's largest solar-thermal power plant.

The principal reason for opposing new
coal plants is the mounting worry about climate change.
Moreover, construction costs are soaringand then there
are intensifying health concerns about mercury emissions
and the 23,600 U.S. deaths per year from power plant
air pollution.

Utilities have argued that carbon dioxide
from coal plant smokestacks can be captured and stored
underground, thus helping keep hope for the industry
alive. Yet, on Jan. 30, 2008, the Bush Administration
announced that it was pulling the plug on a joint
project with 13 utilities and coal companies to build
a demonstration coal-fired power plant in Illinois
with underground carbon sequestration because of massive
cost overruns. The original cost of $950,000,000 when
the project was announced in 2003 had climbed beyond
$1,500,000,000 by early 2008, with further rises likely.
The cancellation effectively moves the date for any
coal plants with carbon sequestration so far into
the future that this technology has little immediate
relevance.

Some utilities are being refused licenses
for coal plants because they have not examined alternative
methods of satisfying demand, such as increasing the
efficiency of electricity use. For example, insulating
buildings greatly reduces energy needs for heating
and cooling. Shifting to more efficient light bulbs
would save enough electricity to close 80 U.S. coal
power plants.

The Sierra Club, a national leader on
this issue, is working with hundreds of local groups
to mount legal challenges in state after state. Other
national groups that actively are involved include
the Rainforest Action Network, Natural Resources Defense
Council, and Environmental Defense. States that are
working to reduce carbon emissions are banding together
to discourage other states from building new coal
plants simply because it would cancel their own carbon
reduction efforts. In late 2006, for instance, the
attorneys general of California, Wisconsin, New York,
and several other northeastern states wrote to Kansas
health officials urging them to deny permits for two
new coal power plants of 700 megawatts each. The permits
subsequently were denied, citing that carbon dioxide
is an air pollutant and should be regulated, as determined
in an April 2007 Supreme Court ruling, hi a letter
on Jan. 22,2008, a similar grouping of states urged
South Carolina's Department of Health and Environmental
Control to refuse a permit for the proposed 600- megawatt
Pee Dee coal plant.

Coal's future prospects also are suffering
as Wall Street turns its back on the industry. In
July 2007, Citigroup downgraded coal company stocks
across the board while recommending that its clients
switch to other energy stocks. In January 2008, Merrill
Lynch downgraded coal stocks. In early February 2008,
investment banks Morgan Stanley, Citi, and JP Morgan
Chase announced that any future lending for coal-fired
power would be contingent on the utilities demonstrating
that the plants would be economically viable with
the higher costs associated with future Federal restrictions
on carbon emissions. Later that month, Bank of America
announced it would follow suit.

In August 2007, coal took a heavy political
hit when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada,
who had been opposing three coalfired power plants
in his own state, announced that he now was against
building coal-fired power plants anywhere in the world.
Investment banks and political leaders are beginning
to see what has been obvious for some time to climate
scientists, such as NASA's James Hansen, who points
out that it makes no sense to build coal- fired power
plants when we will have to bulldoze them in a few
years.

In early November 2007, Rep. Henry Waxman
(D.-Calif.) announced his intention to "introduce
legislation that establishes a moratorium on the approval
of new coal-fired power plants under the Clean Air
Act until EPA finalizes regulations to address the
greenhouse gas emissions from these sources." If a
national moratorium is passed by Congress, it will
mark the beginning of the end for coal-fired power
in the U.S.

"... NASA's James Hansen points out
that it makes no sense to build coal-fired power plants
when we will have to bulldoze them in a few years."

Lester R. Brown, Ecology Editor of USA
Today, is president of Earth Policy Institute, Washington,
D.C., and author of several books; his latest is Plan
B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization.